Help - Lightroom catalog corrupt

alan72

alan72

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Alan
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Can anyone help with this. Having used lightroom 4.2 without a hitch for several months I turned it on yesterday to get a message saying the catalog is corrupt.

I regularly back up my image files to an external hard disk but had not thought about the catalog file. Testing the water I created a new catalog and loaded some images in, to find to my horror that all of the edits and keywords have gone with the old catalog!!!

Does anyone have any advice / experience on recovering the old catalog? or is it a done deal and I need to reload everything (and start backing up catalogs!).

I have the full size jpeg outputs of everything I have worked on, but it is frustrating that the edits seem to be stored in the catalog file rather than with the RAW so all this is lost if I want to go back and revisit the work.

Any help??

Thanks

Alan
 
Do you have any backups of the catalog? AFAIK Lightroom asks to do backups, by default, on a regular basis.

If so, the backup catalog file, should be in the same folder as the catalogue file, but witin a backup date folder.

Alternatively search your hard drive for .lrcat files.
 
Backing up the catalogue is just as important as backing up the images. The lrcat file is the important one. You could try copying it to a new location to see if it will rebuild itself.

Sore one!
 
LR should prompt you to take back ups of the catalogue (unless you have turned this function off?)

I would just check to see if you have a back up of the lrcat file. If not, you might have to start from scratch :(
 
No consolation but ALWAYS ALWAYS back up your catalog. I've had LR4.3 not able to find my catalog on more than one occasion but pointed it at my backup file. As has been said it is as important as backing up your actual images.
 
Have you tried posting on the Lightroom.net forum?

Some very knowledgeable people on there who will take you through your issue step by step.
 
Adobe tech may also be of help
 
As I was backing up to an external drive using a 3rd party software I thought I was covered. If I'd realised the edits were in the catalog I'd have done this aswell. I tend to use folders to index and sort so hadn't worried about the LR indexing.

Just posted on the Adobe forum so will see what comes back. There is still a preview folder with a huge number of subfolders and files within, and some journal files. I don;t know if they contain the info I need to rebuild the catalog? but without some sort of application to recombine (if it is the right data) it's b*ggered.

As they say, good judgement comes with experience, but experience comes from bad judgement!! Chalk this one up to bad judgement.
 
Don't panic. Have a look in the settings or preferences to see where your backup catalog location is and look in there. You then have to open it.
 
You surw you dont have any other lrcat files on your drive?
 
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